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Americans Rate Lawmakers Fairer When Half Are Under 40
In A Nutshell
- Swapping four older lawmakers for four younger ones in a hypothetical eight-member group made 21 more people out of every 100 call its process fair.
- Trust in the group’s future decisions rose too, and the fairness boost held whether the group backed a policy, opposed it, or tackled no issue at all.
- Young adults and Democrats reacted most, though older adults and Republicans also rated the mixed-age group fairer.
- Real data from state legislatures and a UK experiment pointed the same way, but the state data shows a link, not proof of cause.
Swap four older lawmakers for four younger ones in a small decision-making group, and Americans rate the group as fairer and more trustworthy, whether it backs a policy, opposes it, or hasn’t taken up an issue at all. In a new experiment, 21 more people out of every 100 called the group’s process fair when younger lawmakers were added.
Age has become one of the loudest storylines in American politics. Concerns about Joe Biden’s age, 81 at the time, ultimately forced him from the 2024 presidential race, and Donald Trump, the winner, was 78, twice the age of the average American (39).
Political scientists Aksel Sundström, Charles T. McClean, and Daniel Stockemer wanted to know what that age gap does to public faith in government. Writing in the British Journal of Political Science, they report that an all-older group looked less fair than a mixed-age one. Young adults and Democrats responded most, though Republicans and older adults reacted too.
Younger Politicians Lifted Fairness Ratings in an Experiment
In July 2025, the team surveyed 6,029 US adults through the polling firm YouGov, recruited to mirror the country’s mix of age, gender, race, and region. Each person read about a made-up group of eight state lawmakers assigned to weigh in on a policy and saw their photos, taken from real legislators.
Some participants saw lawmakers all 60 or older, averaging 69 years old. Others saw four lawmakers 60 or older and four under 40, bringing the average down to 47. Gender and race were identical across both versions, and both groups were described as having members of both parties, leaving age as the main visible difference.
Participants were then randomly shown one of two policy issues, along with the group’s decision backing or opposing the proposal. One was raising renewable energy standards, a topic where opinions tend to be firmly set. The other was lowering the age to run for any state office to 18, a proposal that gets far less attention. A separate set of participants saw no policy at all, just the lawmakers. Ratings covered the process’s fairness, the decision’s quality, and whether the group could be trusted on future issues.
Fairness took the biggest jump of the three ratings. Trust in the group’s future decisions rose too, by 10 more people out of every 100. Whether the group made the right call barely budged overall, with one exception: on the little-discussed candidacy-age proposal, 6 more people per 100 judged the decision right when the group was mixed-age, while the climate-related proposal saw no change. That fits the researchers’ prediction that a group’s makeup matters more for judging decisions when people lack firm opinions. Fairness and trust gains were nearly identical across both issues, and with no policy mentioned at all, the fairness boost grew even larger.
Young Adults and Democrats Reacted Most Strongly
Among adults 18 to 34, 27 more people per 100 called the mixed-age group fair, compared with 20 among those 35 to 64 and 13 among those 65 and older. Trust followed a similar but smaller pattern, though gaps between age groups were too small to rule out chance.
Politics mattered too. Democrats gave the mixed-age group a bigger fairness lift than Republicans did, 26 more per 100 versus 13, though Republicans moved in the same direction.
Most Say Younger Politicians Better Represent Young People
Participants were also asked whether younger politicians are better at representing young people. Sixty-one percent agreed, including 81 percent of adults 18 to 34 and 75 percent of Democrats.
About half of those who agreed said younger politicians understand young adults better because they are closer to young adults’ everyday lives, and another one in five pointed to a sharper focus on current and long-term challenges. Skeptics leaned on experience: about 4 in 10 said younger politicians lack the maturity or judgment for office, and about a third valued older politicians’ wisdom. Both sides tied age to experience, but supporters valued the kind younger politicians bring and skeptics the amount older ones have.
Younger Legislatures Are Linked to Higher Trust in Government
Pairing state lawmakers’ ages with public opinion surveys from 2022 to 2024, the team found residents of states with younger legislatures reported higher trust in state government, even after accounting for party makeup and gender balance.
A follow-up experiment in March 2026 surveyed 1,315 people in the United Kingdom, recruited through the online platform Prolific. Participants judged a hypothetical group of local council members, either all older or mixed-age, with no policy mentioned. Results matched: mixed-age groups seemed fairer and more trustworthy.
Four younger seats were enough to change how fair a group of lawmakers looked. Real legislatures are a tougher test, and the state numbers show only a link, not a cause. Still, the pattern held in two countries and across party lines. A group that looks more like the people it serves may simply earn more of their confidence, which backs the authors’ argument that recruiting more young leaders could help restore trust in democratic institutions.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes one peer-reviewed study for a general audience and is not a substitute for the original research. Findings from a single study, especially one built on hypothetical scenarios, should not be treated as settled fact. Readers who want the full methods and results should consult the published paper.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Participants judged hypothetical groups of lawmakers (described in the paper as state legislative committees) built from photos of real state legislators, so the experiment measures perceptions of a scenario rather than reactions to real legislative committees or behavior over time. The design compared only two compositions, an all-older group and an even split, and two policy issues. Researchers removed respondents who failed manipulation checks (questions confirming they noticed the group’s details), cutting the policy-condition sample from 4,785 to 3,693. Results were similar with everyone included, and the decision-quality estimates became statistically significant in that version. Even so, the effect on decision quality was weaker and less consistent than the effects on fairness and trust, and the differences between age groups on trust were not statistically significant. The state legislature analysis shows an association, not cause and effect. The UK replication used a hypothetical local council with no policy decision, and the US sample was built with demographic quotas rather than random selection.
Funding and Disclosures
The work was supported by an ERC Starting Grant (project no. 101117889) and the Swedish Research Council (grants no. 2020-03155, 2019-03218, and 2016-02119). The authors reported nothing to disclose under competing interests. The US study was pre-registered at the Open Science Framework, and the age data for state legislatures came from the Young Elected Leaders Project at Rutgers University.
Publication Details
“Youth Representation and Democratic Legitimacy” was written by Aksel Sundström (Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Charles T. McClean (Political Science, Yale University, USA), and Daniel Stockemer (Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada). McClean is the corresponding author. The paper was received December 19, 2025, revised June 26, 2026, and accepted September 16, 2026. It was published in the British Journal of Political Science (2026, Vol. 56, e60, pp. 1-11) by Cambridge University Press under a Creative Commons Attribution open-access license. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123426101823. Replication data: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Y00JR5 (Harvard Dataverse).
